PC vendor Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) yesterday said it is making better advances in expanding its server revenue over a five-year span to 2026, extending last quarter’s growth momentum.
Asustek fell behind its local peers in tapping into the server market, but its ambition to grow server revenue by five times within the 2022 to 2026 period looks more realistic after its strong performance in this year’s first quarter.
Server revenue increased several times last quarter from a year earlier to about NT$100 billion (US$3.1 billion), Asustek said.
Photo: Vanessa Cho, Taipei Times
“We are a latecomer to the server market, but we are making all-out efforts to achieve a better performance than we have announced,” Asustek chairman Jonney Shih (施崇棠) told reporters after the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting yesterday.
“There will be multiple times [of growth]. Besides, the timing is just ripe,” Shih said.
Asustek said it is confident that its server business would grow at a similar pace throughout this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers.
The company counts some of the world’s major cloud server providers as its server clients.
Asustek said about 70 percent to 80 percent of its server revenue came from AI servers.
To play catch-up, Asustek has created a server team, which comprises more than 600 engineers.
The company said it aims to expand the team without giving any specific numbers.
Asustek said its server team is can compete with the nation’s major original design manufacturing (ODM) companies in developing high-quality products.
The company said it can equip servers with Nvidia Corp’s latest Blackwell GPU architecture.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), which makes AI servers powered by Nvidia’s AI chips, has the biggest server team among local ODM companies, with 2,200. Quanta aims to grow its server team by 10 percent this year to catch up with strong demand.
Asustek is also focusing on developing its AI robot ZenBo.
The company invested in AI robots a few years ago, but its development was “premature,” given inadequate computing power at the time, Shih said.
“There was no fundamental demand at the time, as it was not intelligent enough to interact with users,” Shih said. “Now, Asustek’s Zenbo can speak to users fluently and respond to their needs after being trained on big-language models”
“The timing is right,” he added.
AI SPLURGE: The four major US tech companies have lost more than US$950 billion in value since releasing earnings and outlooks, while equipment makers were gaining Four of the biggest US technology companies together have forecast capital expenditures that would reach about US$650 billion this year — a flood of cash earmarked for new data centers and all the gear within them. The spending planned by Alphabet Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc and Microsoft Corp, all in pursuit of dominance in the still-nascent market for artificial intelligence (AI) tools, is a boom without a parallel this century. Each of the companies’ estimates for this year is expected either near or surpass their budgets for the past three years combined. They would set a high-watermark for capital spending
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
COLLABORATION: Taiwan and the US could jointly find solutions to weaknesses in supply chain resilience for critical materials, focusing on mining and initial refinement Taiwan is likely to purchase rare earths from the US in the future, and is also in talks with Australia and Canada to strengthen global rare earth supply chain security, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday. Taiwan and the US last month concluded the sixth Economic Prosperity Partnership Dialogue, during which both sides signed a joint statement endorsing the principles of the Pax Silica Declaration, pledging to deepen cooperation in areas including critical minerals. At the time, Kung said the two sides would establish working groups to advance cooperation in areas including artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, critical materials and
RSS